There was a while, not too long ago, where I was spending an inordinate amount of time irate at the people I considered friends and acquaintances on various social media platforms.  I couldn’t, and still can’t, believe the level of dumb being leveled at me day by day and hour by hour.  It was as though I’d stepped through a portal and everyone I’d ever met had gone completely insane and/or dropped about 30 IQ points.  I did some shuffling, some blocking, and some straight-up deleting, and now my feed is a lot less irritating.  Now the only source of my feeling like I might possibly be living in an alternate reality is the fact that Donald Trump is actually considered a viable political candidate.

All the afore-mentioned dumb got me thinking.  How is it scientists are shunned for youtube nobodies and actual science is shunned for conspiracy shill?  How can blatant facts, easily observed, become fabrication and conspiracy?  How can black people getting murdered for the color of their skin be turned into a pity party for white people?  How does social equality becoming a real possibility become ..I don’t even know…whatever it is the crazies are afraid of it becoming?  We live in this strange world where being accepting of one thing is considered to be absolutely exclusionary of all other things, and it’s weird.  And honestly, how the FUCK does Trump get where he’s gotten to?  The man is abhorrent, disgusting, and people lap it up.  In all honesty, Trump makes me far less sick than the thousands and thousands of people who support him because ‘he speaks his mind’.

I’ve always considered myself a progressive kind of guy.  I’m absurdly liberal when it comes to most political issues.  I don’t go around oppressing people.  I’ve had friends, lovers, and business partners of multiple shapes, colors, backgrounds.  I’ve tended to date very strong, intellectual girls/women.  I was the first person many of my gay friends came out to, back when that was more of a stigmatized thing.  I’m still often someone people come to for advice about potentially sensitive or polarizing subjects.  I’ve always tried to treat everyone as equal because I don’t understand how race, color, gender, etc can be a delineating factor in your quality as a person.  All in all, I’m a pretty swell fellow.  The exception to the white middle-class male rule, perhaps.  I am goddamn magnanimous.

But my course of thought took me down some roads through the past, where I’ve said and thought some things that, in retrospect, are pretty damn unsavory.  At the time they felt justified, righteous, or funny but now..well, now I realize I’ve certainly had my share of dumb as well.

I’ve been that guy who (in my early 20’s) felt like it was totally unfair for there to be a BET and a black history month, but no white equivalent.  Living in a predominantly conservative, white, city/state, nobody ever checked me on this.  It took a personal moment of realization that, holy shit, all TV was WET, and all history classes were white history.  I feel dumb for even having this lapse in judgment and even dumber for thinking it was funny or remotely original, but the fact of the matter is it was a thing that happened in my brain.  I had entered that mindstate of ‘if it’s not about me, it’s bad’ I guess.  This is the thinking that leads us to people not being able to comprehend why #blacklivesmatter is such an important thing.  It doesn’t excuse it in the slightest, but I understand how a head can get turned in the wrong direction about it.  You see plenty of the ‘well white people are getting killed too’ thing posted around.  And yes, it’s true, white people do get killed by cops fairly often.  But so do black people, very often, and often times for little more reason than just existing somewhere.  This is unacceptable and it’s important for change to happen.  For change to happen in a big way there has to be a rallying cry.  Black Lives Matter is a good thing.  Here’s a tip for all you (us?) white guys out there…nobody who says that phrase also says ‘white lives don’t matter’.  Or, maybe one guy who’s super pissed off and abrasive does somewhere, but he’s not the movement and he’s not the voice.  He’s just super pissed off and abrasive, and wrong…just like you are.

Back when I was fresh out of HS I worked at an independent CD store, the cool one..the alternative to the alternative one.  It was staffed by all of the people you’d think of when picturing a late-90’s independent CD store.  I fell somewhere between the hardcore/goth/hippie kid, we had the ska guy, the hot girl who didn’t know anything about music, a few riot grrl’s, a few burnout hippie guys, and then the ‘I love all music and all people’ kind of people.  It was awesome.

One of the girls that worked there was this badass punk girl named Helen Black.  Multi-color dyed hair, High-eyelet Docs, plaid, piercings, vegan (I believe), drank beers with the best of them, early adopter of the derby girl thing, so on and so forth.  I was awed by her cool, and awed by her intellect.  Being the punk girl of that era, she was also very locally politically active.  She worked all kinds of causes, from Food Not Bombs, to volunteering various places (shelters, I believe), with a strong focus on women’s empowerment.  One day Helen decided to put up a poster of Ani DiFranco, arm raised in victory, hairy armpits flown proud.  I was never a fan of her music, she’s phenomenal at guitar but her song structure and voice are awful, so I drew a little cartoony fly wafting from her pits.  Totally benign, only intended as a statement on hippies.  The response was a diatribe (in writing, in marker, on a poster..because independent CD store) about women’s rights and oppression and how dare I comment on hairy armpits which, to be fair, I wasn’t.  To be unfair my response was of some tribal woman, I’m not sure which..either with a stretched neck, bound feet, or plates in her lips.  My comment something to the effect of ‘tell me about oppression when you’re this.  We make the same money, have the same title, enjoy the same privileges’.  In this case, I was checked.  Punks aren’t known for being passive and quiet, obviously.  I got called out.  We ended up having a great talk and I was enlightened, to a degree, and we stayed friends; all’s well that ends well.  Only, I walked away from the ‘great talk’ scoffing.  I was right and she was wrong.  Why?  Because I hadn’t seen the oppression that happens.  I certainly hadn’t lived it.  To this day I’ve never overtly noticed sexism in the workplace.  Many of my bosses, CEO’s, colleagues, etc have been female and well respected.  I’ve mentioned this to quite a few female co-workers, friends, etc, and most have reported the same thing.

So I was right, right?  I didn’t see it so it obviously wasn’t a problem.

Only, that’s not how the world works.  I am one person, living a fairly insular circle of people, from the hundreds at work to less than that personally.  And then there are the billions of others out there.  Millions in my state alone that I will never cross paths or share any kind of experience with.

The litany of my foolishness could go on for a long time but I wanted to touch on one other failure in particular.

I have been guilty of being the guy who lamented how (to paraphrase myself) ‘this culture of political correctness is ruining everything’.

I’ve always been of the opinion that nothing is sacred when it comes to talk, comedy, life, etc.  I still feel that way a lot of the time and will likely, to my dying day, be party to some of the more inappropriate conversations ever had.  But there’s this thing finally happening in the world, where people are trying to be better at being people, and trying to be more understanding of who and what we all are.  We’re breaking the gender binary and the long-established bounds of love and relationships.  We’re striving to make people feel more comfortable just being who they feel they are in their own skin and it’s awesome.  We’re trying to show people that their worth isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, determined by their skin.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched people suffer, occasionally even losing the battle of life, because they didn’t fit in with what the world told them they should be.

So we’re fixing that, day by day, piece by piece.  Part of the fix requires a hard-world change.  Part is a thought change.  The rest is a conscious swing toward living the way we ought to.  Some of this is language.  The words and phrases we use in our daily lives feel innocuous.  We don’t give thought to the power they may have because they’re just things we use constantly.  They do, however, have power, and often times they can be hurtful.  It’s easy to say ‘buck up’ when it’s not you who’s been hurt, and that seems to be the common response, but what needs to happen is the harder thing, which is to introspect and think about how the things we do can affect others, whether we want them to or not.

Maybe it’s weak (another hotly-debated word) to say hey, maybe we shouldn’t be saying certain things, and here’s why.  The easy response is to aggress or defend.  In the long run, though, that response is the weaker overall, the reactionary one.  You’ll notice the people who argue ‘it’s only a word’ generally still have things they won’t say..at least in public.  More ‘only words’, but ones they aren’t comfortable with.  It takes a lot of strength to analyze and change the things you’ve engrained over years and years and it’s what needs to happen.  There are things I’ve had to train myself to not say anymore (I used to say things were retarded pretty constantly), and there are other things I’m working to be conscientious about.  If that makes me weak, so be it.  If it makes me a better person, here’s to it.

For some stupid reason it took a long time for me to realize how wrong all this thinking was, and I feel dumb for not having realized it sooner.  How could such a ‘progressive’ guy be so neanderthal inside?  I’m honestly not sure.  I think maybe part of it is that, no matter how much we may differ from them, we’re still part of our environments.  I was a ‘progressive’ guy in a conservative place.  Maybe I just never had the proper checks and balances to say hey, you’re doing this wrong.

Maybe I’m just an asshole.  (Maybe you’re just an asshole.)

 

But I’m trying to be less of one.  You should try too.